The new radical gesture: Repel the spiders from Mountain View!

On a late May evening when it felt too hot to move, a bunch of mostly young media and literary types gathered in a dim showroom at 92YTribeca. They had come to hear adolescent make-out stories, read from a new zine edited by Marisa Meltzer and Elizabeth Spiridakis.

Meltzer, whose second book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, came out in February, said hers was at The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1993. ("He just sort of ate my mouth," she recalled, widening her jaw to mimic a sloppy wet teenage saliva exchange.) New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica rattled off a list of excuses for first kisses that never happened, with Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love" playing in the background. ("Because you were a publicist;" "Because you only email me when your boyfriend's band is on the road.") Emily Gould, straight off a tour promoting her new memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, narrated a recent Facebook message from the lucky guy who was the first to plant one on her back when they were 9. And Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes wandered through an X-rated diatribe that managed to incorporate some terms probably unfamiliar to Spiridakis' parents, who were in the audience, before Spiridakis intervened.

Story Continued Below

"The kiss!" Spiridakis shouted from stage right, where she and Meltzer were sitting cross-legged in orange-patterned lounge chairs. "The first kiss, Gavin."

"Well, that's in the zine," McInnes replied. "Do you really wanna hear about that?" (Um, yes? Teaser from the zine, titled First Kiss: "I could tell she was ready to get her fucking face Frenched off so I went in for the kill without a mo

ment's hesitation.")

Earlier that day, a debate had erupted on Tumblr over the price of First Kiss, a 68-page booklet photocopied on 20 lb. sheets of paper bound by staples and a slightly heavier cover stock: five dollars at the event (the ticket cost $12), or nine dollars in the mail.

a zine for 9$ or 15 eur? in the time of internet? ... how different from what zines used to be. the whole idea was to publish them primarily in order to spread thoughts, information, discussions, etc. which could have otherwise not been spread. so, what can be the motivation for creating a zine for a price which is not affordable for some, if a free online access could simply do it?

Great, but is that the motivation behind THIS zine? No. Since, like you said, everything is now online, things in print have to be extra special. And this zine is — there’s something more personal about reading a bunch of people’s first kiss stories in a zine than online. I think that $9 for something like that, of which there are only 800 copies, is reasonable.

Zines used to cost two dollars because it used to cost two dollars to photocopy and ship them. That was ten years ago. Meet inflation. Meet reality. Meet deal with it and keep doing what you’re doing because it means something, regardless of how much it costs.

People are still doing ‘zines? Hell, if the internet had been around in 1990, we sure as shit wouldn’t have gone through the effort and money of printing and distributing a physical ‘zine. What’s the matter with you kids!?

BACK IN THE '90S, PEOPLE MADE ZINES BECAUSE it was the only way to get other people, to get strangers, to read what they had to say. And the premium was on saying things that weren't being said, or couldn't be said by anyone but the author. A whole zine about hating Evan

It was intensely demotic, even proudly antiprofessional: slap together several sheets of 8-and-a-half-by-11-inch paper and fold in half and saddle-staple. It cost about three cents a page at Staples. Then the sophisticated infrastructure for distributing these zines took care of the rest. You could send your zine to other zines, famous zines, like Maximum Rock 'n' Roll and Factsheet 5, that would review it and list your address or P.O. box so people could trade copies of their zines for some of yours. You could mail a bunch to "distros" that would in turn compensate you whenever they sold one. In New York, you could get See Hear Fanzines on 7th Street, which is now closed, to carry your zine, or for a while even St. Mark's Bookshop or some of the now-gone downtown record stores. Or you could donate it to the zine library at ABC No Rio, which is still active, where other zine-people might just read it.

But even that kind of scale started to look inefficient by the time easy-to-use blogging platforms started showing up. Bottom line: It doesn't take much these days to amass a large devoted online readership, especially not for web-native 20- and 30-somethings who live in New York and work in the media.

And yet, 20- and 30-something web natives who live in New York and work in the media are the ones spearheading this modest zine revival.

"I went to like, two zine release parties in the last month," said Meltzer.

It was the week before the First Kiss reading, and Meltzer, who is 32 and lives in Prospect Heights, was sitting in a bar in Soho sipping a Diet Coke. She was wearing a pin-striped shirt with sleeves that ended just above the star tattoos wrapping around her left elbow. She pulled at her curly blond hair while reminiscing about discovering zines in the early '90s while reading Sassy, the iconic indie glossy teen magazine about which she co-wrote her first book in 2007.

"I've had so many conversations with people over the last few months, and it would always be like, 'We should start a zine!' So yeah, I've definitely been feeling for the past year like I've had all these, you know, sort of late-night drunken conversations where by the end of the night, everyone decides they're gonna do a zine together."

Until First Kiss, Meltzer, who grew up in Santa Cruz, hadn't made a zine since she was 17. It was a one-off called And She Whispered Secrets In My Ear. The cover was Xeroxed from a National Geographic photo of a Sicilian prostitute. "I grew up reading them," she said. "I can't really remember when they stopped being a part of my life, but certainly the Internet took over. I was a pretty early blog reader."

Meltzer and Spiridakis got the idea for First Kiss, which includes about 50 bylines, on the way to a holiday party one night last December. It grew out of a conversation about "formative adolescent sexual experiences," Meltzer said. A few days later, they put out a call for for submissions on Tumblr, Twitter and Spiridakis' blog, and then spent the winter and spring compiling and editing it in their spare time. They made 800 hand-numbered copies, complete with typos, spelling errors and handwritten notes, for a little under $1,000 at Kinko's.

"We definitely could have done something like this online, but zines are special, so we got way more submissions and people took it more seriously than I think they might have if we just put it online," said Meltzer. "Somehow I think people rose to the occasion a little more."

"People are tired of having to make everything professional, to turn everything into either a trend story or some piece of cultural criticism," she said. "When you're a writer, there's such an instinct to monetize all your interests and turn them into work in some way. So a zine is one nice way to feel more casual, more off the grid. I'm not a proponent of rejecting the Internet, or rejecting paid work or anything like that. I just think in these times, when everyone has to hustle for stories to get their names out there, it's nice to have side projects."

ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY EVENING, ZACH Baron and Nick Sylvester, both 28, were sitting in a corner booth at Bowery Bar on East 4th Street, drinking a Negra Modelo and Maker's neat, respectively, and talking about why they made a zine.

"We all have a million outlets to write about, you know, Lady Gaga, and basically none to write about a first kiss, or a road trip, or some really awful New York experience," said Baron, an editor at The Village Voice who writes the paper's "Sound of the City" blog. (He also contributes to Capital.) "It's like, you're always trying to get more eyeballs or a bigger check. If you can find an outlet that releases you from those pressures, it's a beautiful thing."

Baron started the zine, Perineum, in December, 2008 with fellow Harvard alum Sylvester, the former Pitchfork and Village Voice writer who was fired from the weekly in 2006 over a fabricated passage in his first cover story. (He's been working as "The Colbert Report's" Internet prankster ever since.)

Perineum, which takes its name from the anatomical term for a certain part of the human nether regions ("It's a zine for not quite dicks and not quite assholes," Sylvester explained), has had some impressive writers. The most recent issue, a small yellow envelope filled with stickers containing short bursts of prose, came out in March with contributions from veteran pop-rock critic Robert Christgau, The New Yorker's Lizzie Widdicombe, and Sam McPheeters, a well-known freelancer who's more recognizable to fans of early '90s punk as singer of the influential New York hardcore band Born Against. Pat Smear, the former guitarist of Nirvana and The Germs, wrote something for one of the earlier editions. There are four issues to date.

"I think you can reasonably get away with thinking people give a shit when it's a hundred copies and you're giving them to people you know," said Sylvester. "Whereas you can put something on the Internet, and you're one of a million other things people have heard about."

"But it's also situational," Baron said. "In the '90s, it may have been considered weird to do a zine. But now, when every motherfucker I know has a Tumblr, it's like, there's something really boring about Tumblr! And there's something really boring about Twitter, and there's something really boring about a new website. It's all we look at all day. It's all we see."

"And the way in which the Internet is participatory culture is very different," he said. "The Internet has this vast illusion of participatory culture. You can comment, you can re-tweet, you can re-blog, but it's often very impersonal and kind of false and not meaningful. It's very hard to meaningfully include someone online in anything, and I feel like there's something different about being like, 'we're doing this thing, there's only a hundred copies and we want you to write a story for it.'"

Plus, you can't hand someone a blog.

Nicole Brydson, a former writer at The New York Observer, recently made a zine version of BrooklynTheBorough.com, the hyperlocal news and culture website she founded in 2008. She handed out a few hundred copies at a party promoting the site.

"No matter how many people you get in a room, they won't get a hands-on feeling" for Brooklyn The Borough "without a bunch of computers around," she said. "With the zine, it was much easier to engage potential readers on the spot."

Spiridakis, whose dayjob is as a fashion writer, ran into Jack McCollough of the design duo Proenza Schouler last month.

"I got out of a cab on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth, and Jack was the one waiting to get in after I got out," she said. "We've met before and have some friends in common, so it wasn't a totally random thing. But I was definitely like, 'Oh hey! How are you? Wanna copy of my zine? You're gonna love it, I swear!'"

"There's something to be said for having a stack of zines in your backpack at all times," Meltzer said of the exchange.

"I love digital and I do social media stuff and spend a lot of time online," said Douglas McGray, founder and editor-in-chief of the San Fransisco-based live performance periodical Pop-Up Magazine. "But for a long time, it seemed like we were stuck with two choices—that you can either be part of traditional media, or you can do stuff on a website that's kind of like a lot of other websites. I like the fact that there are some experiments right now that are kind of both and neither."

McGray and his collaborators put out the first "issue" of Pop-Up in April of last year as a way to bring journalists, authors, photographers, artists and filmmakers together and let them showcase their work in real time. The third issue, for which 1,000 tickets sold out in about 40 minutes, McGray said, happened in April. The primacy of live contact is a religion at Pop-Up: there is no online video recording of the events; there are no printed magazines. While the evanescence of a "live magazine" would seem to be the opposite of having a tangible printed object in hand, they share that immediacy, that direct engagement with the reader—and they share with zinemakers the feeling that sometimes, the Google search spiders are to be warded off rather than lured in.

"In theory, you can raise a lot of money and do something like this on the web," he said, "but the web hasn't totally delivered in the way I expected it to on the promise of multimedia. Most sites tend to do one thing well, maybe two things, and all the other stuff is just done on the cheap to drive traffic."

IN A RECENT "MEDIA EQUATION" COLUMN, DAVID CARR considered the implications and consequences of search engine optimization (that's "SEO" for anyone too proud to admit not knowing what those initials stand for): "When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the offbeat, the mysterious, frequently go unchecked," he wrote.

"But it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot."

Writing on The Daily Beast, Rachel Sklar touched on the same idea earlier this year in an article that gave props to The Awl:"If you care about the news and write what you want to read—not just what you think Google search wants to read—there are people out there who want to read it," she wrote. "This philosophy neatly sums up the success of The Awl, created by former Gawker-ites Alex Balk and Choire Sicha. The two looked at the Internet and didn't see the site that they wanted, so they made one. They had writers they liked write about topics they found interesting, and built up a site filled with content they cared about, presented according to their rules. (Those writers, by the way, contribute for free, and not because they don't have any other options.) Yes, they talk about Megan Fox, but when they do it's like this. And some of their posts don't even have headlines. Yet, they're in the top 75 sites on Technorati. More of this, please."

It's not a zine or a "pop up magazine," but it seems hard to separate from the broad gesture those two imply.

Sicha and Balk use all sorts of Google-spider repellent—un-search-friendly headlines, insidery or joke tags and misleading meta data on photos. (A recent post quibbling with a diction error in the Paris Review was tagged, "GAME ON, HOLD MY HOOPS, OH NO SHE DIDN'T, SNUCK!, THE PARIS REVIEW; the metadata on the picture reads, "gonna SNEAK UP ON YOU!") In the right rail where you are accustomed to finding the usual "most read" lists, you'll also find "least-read," an explicit invitation to find something everyone else hasn't already read.Commenters are assigned numbers based on the order in which they registered for the site: commenters frequently express their jealousy of "double-digit" commenters. And the regulars are clearly in on the joke.

"We try to do things that we enjoy doing, including things that won't be appreciated or even noticed," said Sicha in an email.

"One thing that most blogs really do have in common with zines," Sicha added, "is that one instant's precious little thing is gone almost immediately. What I remember about zines is that they took forever to make and then their actual 'shelf life,' as it were, was about 10 seconds. That's not so different from a long blog post that someone slaved on for an hour or a week! The Internet may archive everything but the actual Internet is so voluminous that most things will never, ever be found again."

(Incidentally, a line scrawled into Sicha's own 1993 zine, Bad Representation, read: "If you don't like typos and bad layout, go read October. No one else is.")

Which brings us to the vast sea of online ephemera that is Tumblr. Tumblrs aren't exactly straight up blogs, but they're not primarily social-media-oriented, either. And even if there is something generic and mundane about the fact that every hip New York media person seems to have one, Tumblrs embody certain ziney qualities. They thrive on like-minded people trading off and rehashing one another's ideas. They're highly customizable. Certain templates evoke a raw, minimalist, type-written aesthetic. It was all part of the point.

When Jessica Ferri and Elizabeth Gumport, two 25-year-old freelance writers living in Brooklyn, decided to make a zine but ended up being low on money, they thought the next best thing would be to put it on Tumblr instead.

"I would have loved to do it in print, but it just didn't make sense," said Ferri.

And imagine if the zinesters of yore had been able to engage one another on a sophisticated digital platform rather than having to do so in the pages of other zines, or on primitive message boards and list-serves.

"Physically bringing something into being is awesome," said O'Connell, "but there's also something really cool about being able to have a conversation and creating a community in a much more efficient way that zines hoped for in the '90s, but never could achieve."

Meltzer said she will continue printing zines and continue to write online. The next zine she and Spiridakis put out is going to be about Beverly Hills 90210, to be released (obviously) on Sept. 2, 2010. Then they're gonna do one about heartbreak. And then a zine dedicated to Winona Ryder; no good reason except for the fact that they're obsessed with her.

"Everything about this era, I feel like so much of it is a realization of my teenage fantasies," she said.